


Cloak and Dagger

by AdaptationDecay



Category: Fairy Tales & Related Fandoms, Fairy Tales (trad), Kinder- und Hausmärchen | Grimm's Fairy Tales, Rotkäppchen | Little Red Riding Hood (Fairy Tale)
Genre: Chance Meetings, Dark, Gen, POV Original Character, Post-Canon, Religion, Revenge, Yuletide, challenge:Yuletide 2008
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2008-12-25
Updated: 2008-12-25
Packaged: 2017-11-23 23:32:47
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,215
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/627752
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/AdaptationDecay/pseuds/AdaptationDecay
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
      <p>With thanks to shewhoguards for the beta-read.</p>
    </blockquote>





	Cloak and Dagger

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Brigdh](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Brigdh/gifts).



> With thanks to shewhoguards for the beta-read.

 

 

She has a covered wicker basket and a red cloak which she has long outgrown. Beneath its ragged hem her legs are thin and pale, and he stares at them in the lamplight for a good while before he speaks.

"Pardon me for saying so, but should a young lady like you be traveling alone? Especially so close to the old forest! You hear stories..."

"I grew up in that forest."

It's a lie of course, nobody lives there but the animals and the ghosts of lost travellers, yet she tells it unflinchingly. This girl stands there with her badly fitting cloak and her badly fitting smile and lies to him earnestly.

"There's a place near the middle where people live, but it's hard to travel to. My nana used to say our family grew there with the trees."

She turns to look out the window. He feels oddly as if he has been dismissed, but persists in the conversation.

"Robin Copely. Folks call me Rob."

She shakes his hand.

"Folks call me Little Red Riding Hood."

He doesn't laugh. He has decided that she is almost certainly running away from home which is why she has made up this absurd cover story about living in the forest and the equally improbable name.

"There's wolves in that forest," he tells her. "It's no place to raise a child."

"There was a wolf once," she says. "It did for my nana."

He expresses the conventional regrets in spite of his total conviction that the dead grandmother is every bit as untruthful as the ridiculous name. She nods at him and continues.

"That's how I came to be out of the forest. I was younger then. Mama told me to take a present of some food down the heartroad to Nana's. I wasn't to stop on the way or speak to anybody or terrible things would happen. I was halfway when the wolf came from the forest and said I should pick Nana some flowers. I told it Mama didn't want me to stop, but it said just think how pleased Nana would be and..."

His patience frays. The girl is too old for that sort of make-believe.

"Surely you don't expect me to believe the wolf spoke to you?"

"Not with its mouth, no. All the children of the forest can understand the animals. We're kin with them," she says, and sounds prim as she says it. As if he's said something rude. He lets her carry on. He is waiting for the punchline.

"When I got to Nana's, the wolf had got there first. It had eaten her half away and then went for me, only there was a woodcutter quite close and he heard me cry out. He ran to the cottage and took the wolf's head off with his hatchet."

She stops for a moment. Takes a breath.

"Mama always said terrible things would happen if I spoke to anybody on the heartroad. After that day, they never stopped happening. He sat me on his cart, next to the wood and the dead wolf and took me home with him to wed."

He is surprised to hear she was married. She isn't wearing a ring and she doesn't look married, if marriage can be said to have a look. The strange girl lacks the smoothness that comes from having somebody to knock away your corners and the sureness that comes from knowing you belong to somebody. She looks sharp and brittle and alone, but he tells her that if she'd come away with her health, a husband and a chance to see life in town, then she did pretty well out of it, all things considered.

She looks at him as if he's smacked her.

"He shouldn't have taken me from the forest. Nor the wolf neither. When you slay an animal there, you have to lay its head in the circle grove for the gods of the trees. It's bad luck to take it away. I told him that, but he laughed at me and said he'd get a fine price on it from some rich man who was too craven to hunt down wolves himself."

This is true enough and he tells her so. There are cowards a-plenty willing to pay for a beast's head on their wall and a chance to brag to their credulous friends about their hunting prowess.

"Even so," she says, "I was unhappy. I owed him my life, so I tried. I tried to be a good wife and do well for him, but it wasn't right. Children of the forest aren't meant to be kept away from it. The town was no place for me. All brick and smoke. It gets in your throat and itches there. I wanted to go back to the forest and make my peace with the gods. But how could I? They wanted their wolf's head to eat and now it was hanging over the fire of a rich townsman somewhere. I couldn't go back without it or the gods would take mine as payment. But I couldn't keep away forever, either. With the tree gods angry, how was Nana to know peace?"

She looks out the window again, and he finds himself following her gaze. Their reflections are bright and off-kilter in the uneven glass and behind them the forest looks darker than usual.

"She'll be walking out there now. Lost. Neither dead nor living. I have to go to her. To try to make my peace with the gods. To earn her rest."

She says this with such conviction that for a moment he believes her. But only for a moment.

"So you ran out on your husband for some superstition? Him that saved you from the belly of the wolf? Is this how you thank him?"

She gives him the same look as before, the hurt, pious look.

"I ran out on no-one. My husband is dead this past week. It is only now I'm free that I've traveled back to the forest. This is my last stopping place. I'm only half a mile from the heartroad now and that will take me back into the centre of the forest. I would have started out for the last leg of the journey already, if i hadn't stopped to tell you my tale."

She picks up her basket and stands. Seeing she is going, he tries to make peace.

"I'm sorry to have kept you and sorrier to hear about your husband. I hope it was painless."

"I must dash your hopes, then. He was murdered and by his own hatchet."

"That's terrible," he says. "Who did it?"

"They never did find the killer." She pauses and in that pause he sees something dance across her face, wild and secret. "They never found my husband's head either."

She is halfway to the door before he can bring himself to ask the question.

"Little Red Riding Hood? What's in your basket?"

He thinks she might run, but instead she favours him with another ill-fitting smile.

"A present for my Nana."

Pulling her hood up over her head, she leaves the inn and he watches her through the window until she vanishes entirely, absorbed into the darkness of the trees.

 


End file.
